The Italian lakes, and why nobody wanted to leave

Pliny the Younger, the Roman senator and writer, owned two villas on the shore of Lake Como in the first century AD, and gave them names that said exactly what he thought of the arrangement: Comoedia, "Comedy", built low by the water where he could fish from his bedroom, and Tragoedia, "Tragedy", set higher on the hillside for the view. Almost nothing survives of either building, but the instinct behind them, that a lake ringed by mountains and softened by a climate mild enough for olives and citrus was worth building a second home for, has never really gone out of fashion since.

The lakes sit where the last of the Alpine foothills meet the plain of northern Italy, deep basins gouged out by glaciers and then filled with meltwater once the ice withdrew, which is why Como and Garda both run far deeper than their width would suggest. That depth moderates the local climate: cold Alpine air rolls down the valleys, but the water itself rarely gets cold enough to feel it, and gardens on the shoreline grow palms, magnolias and camellias that would struggle a short distance inland or at the same latitude anywhere else in northern Europe.

Como's villas, and the neighbours nobody mentions

By the nineteenth century, Como's shoreline was doing for European aristocracy roughly what it had done for Pliny: providing somewhere to build a villa with a view too good to leave. Villa Carlotta and Villa del Balbianello, both open to visitors today, date from this period of competitive lakeside building, their formal gardens laid out in careful, expensive imitation of an informal Alpine landscape. Stendhal, writing in the 1830s, opened his novel The Charterhouse of Parma with a description of Como's beauty that reads less like fiction than like an estate agent's brief.

Maggiore, Como's larger and less fashionable neighbour to the west, has its own set of grand follies, chiefly the Borromean Islands, where an aristocratic family spent several centuries turning two islets into a baroque palace and a terraced garden respectively, apparently on the principle that if you owned an island you might as well commit to it. Garda, further east and considerably larger than either, trades some of Como's intimacy for open water and Alpine backdrops sharp enough to draw cyclists and windsurfers as much as villa-hunters.

The smaller lakes, and a coast without the water

North of Milan and east towards the Dolomites, a cluster of smaller lakes, Iseo, Idro, Molveno and others, see a fraction of Como's visitors while offering much the same combination of mountain water and mild shoreline climate, on a scale that suits a slower morning's walk rather than a day's sightseeing. Monte Isola, in the middle of Lake Iseo, is the largest lake island in southern Europe and, unusually for Italy's lakes, still bans private cars almost entirely, which keeps its handful of fishing villages closer to what Como's shoreline villages looked like before the villas arrived.

A walking holiday based around Como covers the villas, the funicular views above Bellagio and a stretch of the old lakeside paths that predate the tourist promenades: routes that were originally cut for mule trains carrying goods between lakeside villages long before anyone thought to walk them for pleasure. Further east, a cycling itinerary that adds Garda and Verona to a run through the Dolomites shows how quickly the lake district's mild, almost Mediterranean feel gives way to proper Alpine country a short distance north, with vineyards on Garda's southern shore giving way within a few hours' riding to peaks that hold snow into early summer.

Lake Garda's own shoreline has its own layer of history worth a detour for: Sirmione, on a narrow peninsula jutting into the southern end of the lake, sits above the ruins of a Roman villa complex known, without much evidence beyond local tradition, as the "Grottoes of Catullus", after the poet who wrote fondly of a family property on the lake. Whether or not the ruins are truly his, they are genuinely Roman, and genuinely spectacular in the way they use the water on three sides for cooling in a climate that, two thousand years on, still draws people north from Verona for exactly that reason.

May and June, or September, suit the lakes best: warm enough for the gardens to be at their fullest, and cool enough that a walk along the shore or up to a viewpoint above Bellagio remains a pleasure rather than an ordeal.